National Conservative Leaders’ Letter On The Democrats’ ‘Bailout Budget’

National Conservative Leaders Speak Out on Obama’s “Bailout Budget”

Thursday, March 26th 2009

A message from the following conservative leaders, representing the broader conservative movement:

Edwin Meese, former Attorney General
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity
David McIntosh, former U.S. Representative from Indiana
Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America
Alfred S. Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator

Obama’s Bailout Budget will Bankrupt Americans as it bails out government and special interests, adding $10,000 per family per year to the national debt for the next ten years.

The unprecedented massive spending in the budget proposed by President Barack Obama is simply a bailout for government and special interests. The National Energy Tax and other tax hikes take resources out of the hands of struggling working Americans to finance this bailout. In order to pay for this spending spree, the government will cause irresponsible increases in the deficit, bankrupt the country, and place crushing financial burdens on future generations.

• The president claims that Republicans with “short memories” caused the current debt problems, but in reality he plans to quadruple George W. Bush’s single largest deficit — the record-breaking 2008 deficit — in his first year. The proposed budget will add nearly $1,000,000,000,000 to the national debt every year for the next 10 years, or about $10,000 per family per year.

• The president’s spending measures are too much even for the freewheeling Senate Democrats, 12 of whom declared in a letter to the Budget Committee that “the deficits projected by CBO are simply not acceptable.”

• The Administration raises revenue for this orgy of spending through a series of new taxes, including a National Energy Tax which will impose a “light switch” tax of $3,128 a year on every American household – the same Americans whose taxes Obama promised to cut in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Obama Administration is happy to present the middle class with the bill for a massive spending program designed to cover the government’s past irresponsibility and benefit key Democratic constituencies. While the President always focuses his rhetoric on the “failed” ideas of the Bush Administration, he doubles down on the exact kind of fiscal irresponsibility that led to the current downturn.

George Bush set records with a onerous deficit that surpassed $400,000,000,000, but Obama easily outdoes him in bankrupting the country with an initial planned deficit of $1,850,000,000,000 — roughly $6100 per man, woman, and child in the nation. Every budget through the next decade calls for deficits double Bush’s biggest deficit. This massive bout of overspending will finance Obama’s wildly expensive pet projects, but at tremendous costs to future generations.